I love Neanderthal man: such a tragic figure, in a way. This reminds me how much I love the work of Fischli and Weiss, and in the case of this impossible ambition to draw the whole history of sadness, starting with Neanderthals—this reminds me of their amazing piece "Suddenly This Overview." 

An important chapter in the history of sadness is the birth of the novel, which I equate with the birth of loneliness and isolation. This drawing also shows how I was experimenting with different style of drawing and ultimately chose simpler, quicker styles for the bulk of the film.

In some ways I was using these (hopefully funny) drawings to talk about very serious, real, and unfunny things. My real father did talk to a psychiatrist in the '50s about his homosexuality, and the kind doctor told him his love of men was a "mental illness" that could be cured.

I guess I love pointing out "the first (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank)." It reminds me that our world is a construction, things don't just naturally happen, they're products of history, inventions that change as the flow of ideas change. This wholesome Renaissance female rear-end is part of a sequence of butts I drew, starting with the very first butt to ever attract desire.

This drawing is playing with some of the ideas in the love story between Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and Anna (Melanie Laurent) which explores how love, real love that you can't control, the kind that drives you crazy at times, how that kind of love ( all real relationships really) inevitably make you face or deal with (or actively run away from ) all the shadow parts of yourself that you'd really rather not know about.

This actually relates to real conversations, wonderful arguments in a way, that me and my newly gay dad had about relationships; what was possible, what was real, what you could and couldn't ask for. It also reminds me of the line from Leonard Cohen's song "Bird On The Wire." "I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, he said to me, you must not ask for so much. And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, she cried to me, hey why not ask for more." Those lyrics always haunted me.